TinyURLs in UIEtips

Jared Spool

By Jared Spool

January 19th, 2006

Ulf wrote about UIEtips, our email newsletter:

First thank you for your newsletter which I really appreciate, but why do you persist on using tinyURLs? That can’t be user-friendly.

Yes, they might be shorter, but they really don’t make sense. It’s like buying a pig in a poke.

TinyURLs are a service provided by the great folks at Gilby Productions. When you give the TinyURL system a long URL, it comes back with an abbreviated one, like this: http://tinyurl.com/cxsml

We use tinyURLs because the larger URLs often are too long for a single line, requiring many of our readers to go through gymnastics when clicking on the links. When the URL is naturally short ( such as http://www.uieroadshow.com), we skip the tinyURL.

We’ve talked about building our own version of TinyURL (after all, it’s just a simple matter of PHP programming) that could use more mnemonic abbreviations, but so far the priority hasn’t popped to the top of our to-do list.

Of course, if we could count on everyone having the same email reader, then we’d have much better luck matching our newsletter to their needs.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 19th, 2006 at 5:23 pm and is filed under Letters, Our Community, UIE . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “TinyURLs in UIEtips”

  1. Kristeen Bullwinkle Says:
    January 20th, 2006 at 11:14 am

    I appreciate the use of the TinyURL. I feel like you’ve taken an extra step to make my life a little easier. On a related note, I see you display the http:// protocol when listing a URL. I prefer seeing just http://www.ueiroadshow.com rather than http://www.ueiroadshow.com. In an e-mail I can see the need for the protocol, but not for a page displayed in a browser or in a printed brochure.

  2. Jacob Says:
    January 25th, 2006 at 12:44 pm

    One service out there is LookLeap, which functions much like TinyURL, except that it includes the hostname. Thus you can see better where you are going.

    http://lookleap.com

  3. Derek Says:
    January 26th, 2006 at 12:19 pm

    Maybe I’m missing something, but what’s the downside to configuring Apache to do a redirect (tell incoming links to address “uie.com/tinyurls” to go to “uie.com/brainsparks/2006/01/19/tinyurls-in-uietips/”?)

    Jared, from a search engine standpoint, “tinyurl.com” gets a free link for your (uie.com) content. Things may have changed since I last read about this a year or so ago, but I’m pretty sure that “tinyurl” gets the credit for the links that are actually going to your site, which is a boon for them.

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